And now presenting the 10 Best Uses Of Classical Music In Classic Cartoons!
posted by litterateur on Jul 2, 2009 - 33 comments

Schott's Vocab Blog is doing a weekend competition for 'puns that monkey with the description of reported speech for comic effect', and has gotten about 2000 entries so far!" Tom said swiftly. "Some of them are actually funny if you think about them," he added judgmentally.

"And this no-frills site serves up random Swifties," Wendell said refreshingly. "I wanted to give an extra link because I procrastinated in posting this," he extrapolated.

"There's more on the inside!" he added punishingly. [more inside]
posted by wendell on Jun 6, 2009 - 191 comments

Tom Dula was a real person. Who knew? The Kingston Trio's version of Tom Dooley is the most famous. It says here that Doc Watson's great-grandparents were the Dooley's neighbors. They say Ann Melton confessed before she died... "Folk music is serious business."
posted by RussHy on Jun 4, 2008 - 14 comments

Tom Waits interviews Tom Waits. A charmingly rambling (but what else would you expect?) interview in advance of his PEHDTSCKJMBA tour. Includes these tantalizing words: I’m doing songs with them I’ve never attempted outside the studio. via reddit.
posted by 2or3whiskeysodas on May 21, 2008 - 19 comments

Tom Waits Press Conference (that is all)
posted by ornate insect on May 7, 2008 - 79 comments

Expanding on a previous post about Tom Lehrer, and in what is becoming a grand tradition of single link YouTube posts about him, 6funswede and YouTube present the entirety of An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer.
posted by griphus on Mar 26, 2008 - 15 comments

"Tammy Wynette was quite wrong when she sang 'Sometimes it's hard to be a woman'. It's not. It's always hard to be a woman. Especially if you're a man." Hard-hitting journalism from The Daily Mail. [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster on Sep 20, 2007 - 55 comments

A gay boy wished for a planet full of unicorns, Planet Unicorn, Unicorn Planet! Episode: two, three.
posted by milarepa on Jun 21, 2007 - 52 comments

The One that Got Away - Tom Waits
posted by BrotherCaine on Feb 15, 2007 - 34 comments

Youse is getting to old to cath mouse (disclaimer: loud southern ebonics). I love this woman - queen of the partially seen characters. Bring her back.
posted by Bravocharlie on Nov 14, 2006 - 10 comments

Those crazy Scientologists are at it again. This time, a New Zealand website owner has been ordered to relinquish his clever domain name, scienTOMogy.info under threat of legal action. The site, an ugly-looking collection of links to other Scientology-debunking websites, serves as a clearinghouse for information about one of the church's most notorious members, Tom Cruise. CoS claims the domain is similar enough to their official website address to be confusing to Internet users.
posted by wakko on Oct 19, 2005 - 42 comments

Never mind jumping the shark, has Tom Green lost it? As if Freddy Got Fingered wasn't sad enough, the former Mr. Drew Barrymore is picking blogfights with bloggers!? Isn't it embarrassing enough to be a quasi-celeb with a blog, let alone use it to rally your fans into send hate-mail and threats to a little-known blogger? Or is this just another childish attempt to embarrass his parents?
posted by tsarfan on Sep 19, 2005 - 53 comments

St. James Infirmary, in a funereal, no lyrics, brass-band version underlies a persistent scrum of half-remembered songs about New Orleans rising in concert with the waters, lapping at the sandbags of my mind. Up front, Tom Waits (I Wish I Was in New Orleans) and Randy Newman (Lousiana 1927) are duking it out for time at the piano, elaborately filigreed chords overlapping and changing the dominant lyric at the moment of harmonic convergence, while in the background Arlo Guthrie (The City of New Orleans) warbles about a train ride. Professor Longhair and/or The Dixie Cups (Big Chief, Iko Iko) sort of amusedly fight to keep sliptime with the martial drums from Jimmy Driftwood's The Battle of New Orleans (caution: embedded quicktime) behind the whole toxic soup of sonic residue. I'm sure the stew will grow more dense over the next couple weeks. Got a New Orleans song to toss into the waters?
posted by mwhybark on Aug 30, 2005 - 45 comments

Ballistic Defecation is just what it sounds like. Or is it?
posted by weston on Jun 29, 2005 - 16 comments

Tom Cruise Kills Oprah Quick and silly. [mov file]
posted by zardoz on Jun 27, 2005 - 38 comments

Has anyone else noticed actor Tom Cruise going more and more wacky in public? Is his love affair with the hot-young-actress really a sham? Is this a PR stunt run dangerously wild, or Scientology in action? Oprah's scared, are you? The folks at FreeKatie.net think you should be.
posted by BrodieShadeTree on Jun 14, 2005 - 109 comments

The making of a D-Day tradition... I immediately get goosebumps when I hear the score of Band of Brothers...I'm not sure why, maybe it was my local connections (Dick Winters, Bill Guanere, Albert Blithe, Babe Heffron, Thomas Meehan, Ralph Spina, Harry Welsh, and Robert Strayer are all from Philadelphia), the surrounding suburbs, or Pennsylvania), or maybe it was because the original airings took place in the shadow of 9/11 (the premiere was September 9th, 2001, with the D-Day drop occuring in the second episode, Day of Days, on 9/16/2001), but this series will ALWAYS have a special place in my heart. Everything is done so beautifully, from the special effects, to the sound, the music, to the dutiful translation from Stephen Ambrose book to the screen. It's certainly worthy of the 9.5 out of 10 that IMDB readers had given it. Every year now since, either HBO (On Demand - you have to subscribe to HBO plus have digital cable) or the History Channel has played Tom Hanks' and Steven Spielberg's masterful WW2 epic. You can think of it as Saving Private Ryan, but 3 times as long. Even if war movies are not your thing, I can almost guarantee that they will see the human side of the soldier and becomely deeply invested in the characters. Follow the men of Easy Company from training and the running of Currahee, to the parachute jump on D-Day, through the liberation of Europe, the horror of a German concentration camp, and eventually to the end of the war, to Hitler's mountaintop retreat. I'm not the only one - check out the numerous fan sites to BoB (forum shorthand for Band of Brothers) here, here, and here, as well as entries on TVTome, Wikipedia, and Television without Pity. If you want to try before you commit to watching the whole thing, I'd recommend the episodes Day of Days, Crossroads, and the Breaking Point.
posted by rzklkng on Jun 4, 2005 - 24 comments

Fitness to Practice is a collection of songs written and performed by Amateur Transplants, two practicing doctors from the UK. The album consists of original songs as well as witty parodies of songs originally performed by among others Tom Lehrer and The Jam (mp3 links). The lyrics contain a lot of medical in-jokes, but the humour is broad enough to appeal to everyone.
posted by bap98189 on Mar 31, 2005 - 9 comments

The Original Tom Swift Series Public Domain Texts. Twenty-five of 'em for your perusal. In piles of formats, some including page scans, and with color cover images (mostly from here, where they also have larger images). Not that kind of Tom Swift, mind you.

I must admit, the domain name gave me pause. So far, no teleportation has transpired.
posted by mwhybark on Jul 1, 2004 - 13 comments

Giving Credit where credit is due. For your Friday browsing pleasure, may I present the staff at NPR's CarTalk. Enjoy!
The Conclusive, Definitive, Official Dewey, Cheetham, & Howe Staff List In the good old days, we had an engineer and a rotary telephone with a couple of buttons on it. We pressed a button and--BINGO-- someone was on the air. Of course, it was usually a wrong number...but that's the price you pay for simplicity. Now look at the mess we're in! Thousands of people on the staff...all trying to do less work than us. What a revoltin' development this is. Look at all these employees! But despite our huge payroll--we're always hiring. So if you know of someone who may be worthy to join our crack(ed) staff, send his/her/its name and potential position to the Car Talk Plaza Personnel Department via e-mail to Dewey, Cheetham and Howe.
posted by nofundy on Jun 27, 2003 - 10 comments

Giving telemarketers a taste of their own medicine. It seems too good to be true, but Tom Mabe is managing to make money by messing with their minds. His tormenting even extends to the web. His page is currently the top result on a Google for telemarketers, which is likely a thorn in their side. He's thought up some great responses to use when for some strange reason you just can't hang up the phone. Besides saying you're dead, what have you said to get rid of them?
posted by jaden on May 23, 2002 - 62 comments

The Tom Waits Streaming Event. Anti Records is streaming both of Waits' new albums in their entirety, each in turn for three days starting today, prior to their release. Is the home listening booth for whole cd's a common marketing tactic now?
posted by liam on Apr 30, 2002 - 24 comments